“The essential element of archaeoastronomy, which binds us to our ancestors, is available to all of us each night. A clear, dark, starry night sky brings out intense feelings in even the most sophisticated city dweller. These feelings vary among individuals, but for most they are intense and connect us to something sublime and transcendent. The night sky calls to us and humans over the years have responded with their star tales, their monuments, their theories, and their observatories with gleaming polished glass and sophisticated instruments.
In early eras, the power of stars inspired tales of ancestors, their quest for food, the animals we lived with, and the delicate balance needed to maintain life. The stars taught us the way to live with each other and our environment. As our civilizations grew, the stars provided the basis for binding together hundreds, thousands, and now millions of us in commerce, in religion, in science, and also in war. This process began with setting the calendar, and each civilization from the world used the stars, the Moon, and the Sun to provide a tempo for the dance of its people as they planted crops, moved goods, and planned new ventures.
The process continued as writing empowered people to record over many centuries patterns of events which previously were disconnected – eclipses, comets, and the motions of planets all seemed to repeat, giving great power to the ruler or astronomer who could predict the inner workings of the mysterious clockwork that seemed to run the universe. Our response to the sky continued and evolved from ritual sacrifice to a quiet contemplation of the mysteries of the sky in which the most sophisticated tools of our species were arrayed to wrest the secrets of stars. Counts of stars and catalogs gave way to spectra, which unlocked the secrets of what the stars were made of and how far their light has traveled.
With our knowledge of the stars we better understand our Earth, we realize that the stars and the Earth are made of the same elements forged in the early universe and in the cauldron of earlier generations of stars. These elements have found refuge in the dirt and rock of this small outpost of life at the edge of a great galaxy. The stars call to us and exert a power on us, perhaps since we are formed from them as all the atoms in our bodies come from inside a long-lost star. In archaeoastronomy we can combine our search for answers about the stars with a need to connect to the past – we can connect with the past lives of generations and civilizations long gone and even connect with the past of our universe, which each moment arrives to us in the light of ever more distant stars.”
